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May 5, 2019, 12:00 PM UTC

By Benjy Sarlin

Democratic presidential candidates have so far looked to
distinguish themselves with flashy new policy proposals. Less
celebrated, but perhaps just as revealing, are the past
positions they've held that they're now running away from.

As candidates look to find their place in the crowded primary
field and face a party electorate energized by the left, many
are massaging or outright reversing old positions — and
sometimes even apologizing for parts of their record that
haven't aged well with voters.

While Joe Biden's long career in the national spotlight
presents special challenges, just about every candidate has had
to recalibrate their stances regardless of age, ideology or
years in office.

Even 37-year-old Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana,
who is largely building his national platform from scratch,
isn't immune. In April, he announced he would no longer take
donations from lobbyists and , catching up to a
recent trend in Democratic politics of activists demanding a
tougher stance on money in politics.

"It requires some tact and some delicacy, but folks are trying
to get up to speed with where the current policies are within
the Democratic Party," said Jim Manley, a longtime aide to
former Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.

While such adjustments aren't uncommon in presidential
primaries, they're also small tweaks in comparison to President
Donald Trump, who frequently reverses stances with little or no
explanation. But the specific ways candidates change each cycle
reveals a lot about the direction of a party.

Whole lotta revamping going on

Crime and punishment is one area where a number of the
contenders have been sanding down their positions and
proposals.

Biden recently softened the edges of his tough-on-crime record,
telling an audience at an event honoring Martin Luther King Jr.
that he made when he served in the Senate by backing
increased penalties for certain drug crimes, including harsher
sentences for crack cocaine compared with powder cocaine.

His movement on drug sentencing comes amid a broader
re-evaluation of the issue: Democrats are now more concerned
about mass incarceration and racial disparities in the justice
system.

That shift has affected other candidates as well. Sen. Bernie
Sanders, I-Vt., has been about his vote for the 1994
Crime Bill that Biden authored. Sanders noted he criticized its
emphasis on incarceration at the time, but explained he
supported it because it included provisions on gun control and
confronting domestic violence that he favored.

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., belongs to a later generation
that was more accustomed to criticism from criminal justice
reform advocates, but she has also qualified parts of her
record. Harris told last month that a California law modeled
on her district attorney policy of threatening the parents of
truant children with prosecution had "unintended consequences"
when other localities used it to arrest and charge offenders,
something she had not done.

"I regret that that has happened and the thought that anything
I did could have led to that, because that certainly was not
the intention" she said.

Jess McIntosh, a Democratic strategist and former aide to
Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, said voters might be more
understanding in cases where elected Democrats, along with
their constituents, had gradually evolved from one broad
consensus on an issue to another.

"Almost every Democrat who was in public office in the '90s has
explaining and apologizing to do when it comes to criminal
justice reform," McIntosh said. "Ditto the early aughts and
marriage equality."

This could include issues like marijuana legalization, which
went from a fringe position when President Barack Obama took
office in 2009 to almost uncontroversial today, with polls
showing widespread support for it.

Former Colorado governor and Democratic presidential candidate
John Hickenlooper might embody the change best: He strongly
opposed a 2012 ballot initiative that made his state the first
to legalize recreational cannabis. But by 2019, he had long
warmed to the idea, telling that Colorado's approach was "so much
better than the old system where we sent millions of kids to
prison, most of them kids of color."

For her part, Harris has after previously opposing it
at the state level.

While the general trend has been toward candidates aligning
with party's left flank on issue after issue, there is one
example where some contenders have tiptoed back to the middle:
single-payer health care.

Former Rep. Beto O'Rourke supported a government-run system
embodied in the "Medicare for All" bill during his Senate run
in Texas last year that would effectively eliminate private
insurance. But in March, after just setting out on the
presidential campaign trail, he and now favors legislation that
would add a Medicare-like option to compete with private
insurance, not abolish it. O'Rourke acknowledged that many
people like their employer-provided health care insurance.

While O'Rourke is the only 2020 hopeful so far to explicitly
back off on his health care position, who signed onto Sanders' single-payer
bill have been emphasizing incremental approaches that would
not include a ban on private insurance.

All politics is local. Until it isn't.

Several candidates are also trying to get out from under past
positions that had put them at odds with the national party but
were aligned with local voters, interest groups or industries
in the district or state they represented in Congress.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., opposed a Democratic bill two years
ago to allow less expensive drug imports from Canada, which
critics argued was a sop to his state's large pharmaceutical
industry. After a backlash, Booker that would open up
the drug market and he swore off donations from Big Pharma.
(Booker , saying the new bill
included better safety standards.)

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who was considered a
relatively conservative Democrat when she represented upstate
New York in the House before she came to the Senate, has
repudiated some of her past positions in the bluntest terms.

In a " last year, Gillibrand said she was
"embarrassed" by her opposition to gun safety bills and
"ashamed" of her past support for proposals to scale up
immigration enforcement and deny driver's licenses to
undocumented immigrants. The NRA has since gone from giving her
an "A" grade to an "F," and she also has come out for and
transferring its responsibilities elsewhere.

from the
left for sometimes voting with gun rights activists, an issue
he has pointed out is viewed differently in rural Vermont. In
2016, he called for repealing a law he once supported that
shielded gun manufacturers from lawsuits.

"When you represent an area and then you run nationally, things
may be different in national politics than they are in a state
or a region," said Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist.

O'Rourke has worked to overcome environmentalists’ concerns
with his record in Texas, home of a booming oil and gas
industry.

He split with most in his party in 2015 by voting to lift a
decades-long ban on oil exports. Environmental groups had
fought the measure, and his campaign said last month that he
, because he lacked
confidence in Trump's commitment to environmental safety. His
campaign also said on a 2016 amendment to restrict
energy exploration off the Gulf of Mexico, which he voted
against at the time. Last week, O'Rourke and announced he
would no longer take donations tied to fossil fuel companies.

Then there's the unusual case of Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii,
who apologized this year for in
Hawaii. In her case, she cited family ties: Her father was a
prominent anti-gay politician who ran a group called Stop
Promoting Homosexuality America.

While generations of politicians have refashioned themselves
for new audiences, the current field faces some challenges
previous ones did not. Thanks to the internet, political
opponents have easier access to candidates' past speeches,
interviews and press releases and an easy way to distribute
them. Individuals can spread old clips across social media at a
rapid pace.

For Democrats, though, the value of moving past potentially
damaging positions and proposals may be worth it, even if it
opens them up to attack.

"The right-wing media is having a field day with this, of
course, but I don't think there's a good way to go about trying
to get about the right side of the issues in this day and age,"
Manley said.

Israel conducted an airstrike on a Hamas facility it said was used to launch cyberattacks...

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